Munich Airport on the up

Munich Airport CEO Michael Kerkloh tells Airside about the big plans for expansion he and his team have for the busy Bavarian gateway

German flag-carrier Lufthansa is growing its presence at Munich. What will this mean for the airport?
We are of course very pleased that Lufthansa has decided to station five of its 14 Airbus A380s here at Munich Airport. That makes Munich the fourth European location, as well as London, Paris and Frankfurt, where the A380 widebody jet is deployed.

Apart from giving us added capacity in the long-haul segment, it especially boosts our overall attractiveness by putting us in a new league among international hubs. Munich Airport is already well known for its high quality standards. We jointly operate an award-winning terminal with Lufthansa, and the airport itself was once again voted Europe’s number one airport in a survey of millions of passengers from all over the world.

Will the expansion resulting from the additional Lufthansa operations form part of a wider, ongoing process of expansion?
The switch to the A380 on Lufthansa’s long-haul routes to Los Angeles, Beijing and Hong Kong certainly represents a big milestone in the successful history of Munich Airport, which has been steadily developing as a high-performance hub for many years. This is the result of a long-term strategy developed jointly with Lufthansa.

Along with their familiar appeal as tourist destinations, Munich and Upper Bavaria offer enormous potential through the countless successful companies based here, not to mention the very large concentration of affluent customers living here.

Munich Airport operates a hub offering excellent connecting and feeder flights to destinations all over Europe in addition to the long-haul services to the Americas and the Far East. Munich serves more European routes than any other airport in Europe.

Is there much spare capacity for you to grow your operations and will your stated requirement for a third runway form the centrepiece of a wider programme of expansion and improvement of airside infrastructure?
Munich Airport has now been in operation for more than 25 years. During that time, we have gradually expanded our facilities, always keeping pace with demand.

A few highlights of our development: in 1992, our first year of operations, we handled 12 million passengers. Since then, our passenger traffic has almost quadrupled to 44.6 million last year. That is an enormous increase, and we have expanded our terminal capacity accordingly. We expanded Terminal 2 and, with the midfield satellite terminal, created capacity for an additional 11 million passengers per year.

With regard to the capacity of our runway system, we have reached our limits. We anticipated this situation and took action well ahead of time to initiate the approval process for a third runway. We need more capacity and are planning to increase the number of take-offs and landings we can handle per hour from the current 90 to 120.

For the construction of the third runway we are waiting for the green light from our shareholders. Our master plan itself offers excellent development prospects for the airport. That is because, in the original design, the planners opted for a ‘green field’ development to ensure adequate space at the new location.

Incidentally, we are now creating an inter-disciplinary ‘LabCampus’, where we will bring together companies, experts, start-ups and global players, creative people and investors to spark innovations and develop advanced applications to the point of market readiness. The aim is to establish a workshop for the future at Munich Airport, an ideas factory, where the mobility concepts of tomorrow will emerge. That will ensure that Munich Airport remains a step ahead in the future, too.

What milestones are currently scheduled in the master plan for the third runway?
We already have a very long approval process behind us. The arguments were exchanged and evaluated over a 10-year period. In the end, the responsible authority granted us planning permission. Various municipalities and citizens’ initiatives took legal action against the planning permission but all of the lawsuits were dismissed, right through to Germany’s highest administrative court, which confirmed the planning permission ruling in every point. After many years of litigation through all courts of appeal, we now have legally valid planning permission for a third runway.

However, we cannot build it until our three shareholders, the State of Bavaria (which holds a 51% share), the federal government (26%) and the city of Munich (23%) give us the green light. This political decision is still pending.

What do the Lufthansa deal and current plans for further expansion at the airport mean for your ground and cargo handlers at the airport? Are they fully on board and able to cater to the further growth in airside operations?
Our facilities are spacious enough for us to accommodate additional traffic on the airport aprons. But to enable the A380 to dock at the terminal, we had to rebuild pier-served aircraft stands so that passengers can board on the upper deck as well.

In general, the deployment of an A380 on a route doesn’t necessarily mean a big difference in cargo capacity. A lot of room is needed in the hold to carry passengers’ baggage. What is interesting for the freight business is the addition of new long-haul routes such as Lufthansa’s recently announced resumption of service to Singapore. And incidentally – it will operate this service with the world’s most advanced, environmentally friendly aircraft: the A350-900.

At Munich Airport, Lufthansa is going to operate 15 of these new, resource-conserving aircraft that use 25% less fuel, generate 25% lower emissions and cause much less noise when taking off and landing.

What other policy priorities do you have?
Munich Airport is going to get greener. We have made sustainable air transportation a corporate objective. We are committed to climate protection and aim to be Germany’s first climate-neutral airport by 2030.

We will reduce carbon dioxide emissions directly attributable to airport operations by 60% by 2030, and will take appropriate measures to offset the remaining 40%.

Technological innovations make a big difference in saving substantial quantities of CO2 emissions, for example through efficiency improvements in the combined heat and power (CHP) and sustainable construction. Our efforts also include the increased use of renewable energy sources, retrofitting of energy-saving LED technology and increasing the share of electric vehicles in our fleet.

We will invest a total of 150 million Euros (US$186 million) in an ambitious climate protection programme. This underscores our belief in the importance of resource-conserving airport operations.

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